for people who care about the West

Heard Around the West

Thanks to skyrocketing prices for gas, a new
breed of criminal has begun preying on restaurants, reports The
Associated Press. "It's like a war zone going on right now over
grease," says David Levenson, who owns a grease-hauling business in
San Francisco. Levenson pumps used cooking oil from 400
restaurants, but recently he's found that "biodiesel pirates" have
beaten him to the punch. He's tried putting padlocks on the barrels
of yellow oil, but "several of those have disappeared, too."

THE WEST

What's
the West got besides scenery, an oil and gas boom, and
second homes? Dinosaurs, that's what, and fossils dug up on private
property command big money from collectors. After a 10-foot-long
baby tyrannosaur was found on the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, the
tribe's business council authorized its sale, reports the
Great Falls Tribune. But when an offer of $5
million came in from a California group called Searching for
Bigfoot Inc., the tribe hoped to find an even better deal and took
the dinosaur off the market. Paleontologist Jack Horner of
Bozeman's Museum of the Rockies, who spent three years freeing the
74-million-year-old fossil from its rocky matrix, said he hopes
that better deal never materializes. He wants the tyrannosaur to go
to a museum instead of becoming an "object in someone's living
room." Nicknamed Cameron, the ancient animal is estimated to have
died at age 2. What makes it remarkable is that it contains a
wishbone, linking it to modern birds. Over in rural Winnifred,
Mont., PERC Reports says that Larry Tuss has
given up growing wheat and barley in favor of farming fossils. "He
has found five dinosaurs on his property, including a duck-billed
hadrosaur, two long-necked, sea-dwelling Plesiosaurs, and a
Certopian, which resembles a Triceratops. ..." Tuss is selling them
all through a fossil company.

THE
WEST

Remnants of more recent
residents permeate the landscape of southern Utah. Hikers
and river-runners routinely spot cliff houses as well as
petroglyphs and pictographs of animals and human hands on rock
walls and boulders. Many artifacts were left behind by the Native
Americans who lived in the area until the 14th century, when some
combination of dire events scattered the people. The artifacts are
protected -- sort of -- if they're on national parks or on other
public land. But under Utah law, says The
Economist, developers on private land have no obligation
to preserve or "even reveal the existence of archaeological
remains." For decades, many developers apparently just kept digging
no matter what part of the past their backhoes unearthed. Now
that's changing as builders realize that "roots, a bit of local
history, may help sales." Developer Milo McCowan, who owns 280
acres in Kanab, says he'll preserve everything he finds and avoid
building houses on the richest sites. In a suburb of St. George
called Bloomington, another developer says he'll feature a huge
boulder marked with petroglyphs by building a cul-de-sac around it.
And the owner of an area near Cortez, Colo., that boasts 200 Indian
ruins, promotes it as "America's first archeological development."
Buyers there will be free to do their own backyard digs as long as
they bequeath what they find to a local museum. A new suburb under
construction near Las Vegas, Nev., has also been bitten by the
preserve-the-past bug. It's incorporating into a new park "an
ersatz archaeological dig."

ARIZONA

On May 19 in Phoenix, the mercury
broke a record by hitting 110 degrees, reports the Arizona
Republic. And on the same torrid day, just before 11
a.m., a man took a cab to the Bank of America in busy downtown
Phoenix, apparently told the cabbie to wait, went inside and robbed
the bank, and then was driven off in the (air-conditioned) cab,
police said.

ALASKA

Faced with a 300-pound dead moose in his yard,
Calvin Hay expected Alaska's Department of Fish and Game to take it
away. Nope, he was told, the state doesn't do that. So Hay took
matters into his own hands, placing an ad for a "dead moose" on
Craigslist, the Web site, reports the Anchorage Daily
News. "If you live in the Lower 48, this might be your
best opportunity to get a free Alaska moose. I don't really care: I
just want it out of my yard," said the ad. Fifty people responded,
but because the responses went to Hay's computer's spam file, "he
wound up paying someone $180 to haul it off to the dump anyway."
State wildlife officers aren't happy with the Craigslist option,
warning that nobody should eat meat from a moose that's dropped
dead for unknown reasons or even use it for bait to kill bear. Yet
if one of the 1,000 moose that frequents Anchorage gets killed on
the highway, that meat is given away to charity. Homeowners remain
on their own -- even if they are faced with a big and stinky
carcass.

Betsy Marston is editor of Writers on
the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado. Tips
of Western oddities are always appreciated and often shared in the
column, Heard around the West.